Paul Starr

Paul Starr is co-founder and co-editor of the The American Prospect. and professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the Bancroft Prize in American history, he is the author of eight books, including Entrenchment: Wealth, Power, and the Constitution of Democratic Societies, which will be out next year.

Recent Articles

This is a contribution to " Prospect Debate: Should We Fight ISIS? " prospect-debates-icon.jpg I n his response to my article in the Winter issue, Jeff Faux calls for the United States to abandon the fight against ISIS and to withdraw from the Middle East. This is not a good idea. ISIS and al-Qaeda, it should be unnecessary to say, represent real threats to the security of people around the world, including Americans. Neither terrorist group is going to stop killing infidels if the United States pulls out. Learning about their intentions is not difficult. They have made those intentions abundantly clear in public statements and videos and through the language of violence. It is not true that all the efforts by the United States to defeat terrorism have failed and that the war against ISIS is “already lost,” as Faux claims. In fact, the measures we have taken against al-Qaeda have severely weakened it, and ISIS is now in retreat in its home territory in Syria and Iraq. In his wholesale...

(Photo: AP/Evan Vucci) Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders speaks during a campaign rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on January 30. W ouldn’t it be great if we could just go to the doctor and not pay any bills? After all, isn’t that what they do in other countries, and don’t those countries have lower health-care costs than the United States does? And aren’t private insurance companies the only reason we don’t have that kind of system? This is the appeal of the Bernie Sanders single-payer health plan. Free health care, with none of the frustrating paperwork of today’s insurance, and with taxes that cost less than insurance premiums—what could be better than that? Of course, the single payer in the Sanders plan is the federal government, which implies concentrating payment and therefore power over health care in Washington. But, at least in this area, many Democrats don’t seem worried about that prospect. Sanders doesn’t just call for incremental steps toward single-...

AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin President Barack Obama addresses the nation from the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, Sunday night, December 6, 2016. The president's speech followed Wednesday's shooting in San Bernardino, California, that killed 14 people and wounded 21. This article will appear in the Winter 2016 issue of The American Prospect magazine . Subscribe here . W e are at a dangerous moment in the interplay of foreign and domestic politics. Jihadist attacks are a boon to the right in Europe and America, and the right’s indiscriminate threats against Muslims at home and abroad are a boon to the jihadists. This is a familiar cycle, a spiral of violence and fear in which the extremes feed off each other. During the next year, there is no greater challenge than stopping that spiral. In the United States, the challenge takes on particular urgency because of the 2016 election. Donald Trump and other Republican candidates play upon public anxieties, fanning hostility to...

AP Photo/Jacques Brinon Rescue workers gather at victims in the 10th district of Paris, Friday, November 13, 2015. M any Democrats—including the candidates for president at Saturday night’s debate in Iowa—are not registering the full import of the attacks in Paris. When French President Francois Hollande declared the massacre “an act of war” and ISIS claimed responsibility and announced that the attacks were the “first of a storm,” the conflict with ISIS entered a new stage. In responding to the advance of ISIS in Syria and Iraq, the Obama administration has tried to rely on local proxies—Syrian moderates, Kurds, the Iraqi army—to do the fighting on the ground, while the United States has supplied air power, intelligence, equipment, and other resources. Obama’s reluctance to commit ground troops is understandable. But with clear evidence his strategy was insufficient, the president announced on October 30 that several dozen special operations forces would go into Syria. Although the...

I n a reversal of earlier trends, death rates among white non-Hispanic Americans in midlife increased sharply between 1999 and 2013, according to a new study by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, winner last month of the Nobel Prize for economics. The increased deaths were concentrated among those with the least education and resulted largely from drug and alcohol “poisonings,” suicide, and chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. This midlife mortality reversal had no parallel in any other industrialized society or in other demographic groups in the United States. Case and Deaton’s analysis, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , also shows increased rates of illness, chronic pain, and disability among middle-aged whites. The findings have important implications for American politics and public policy, particularly for debates about economic inequality, public health, drug policy, disability insurance, and retirement income. The data also suggest...